My review of the Geneva Trip 1/28-2/4

My thoughts about Geneva, Switzerland:
Good:
- The city has a beautiful lake and the building architecture is nice.
- Swiss specialty chocolate is really tasty.

Bad:
- Everything is really expensive.
- There is almost nothing to do as Geneva is mainly a business city.

Other:
- It isn't necessary to know French, but it helps if you do.

What I did / Where I went:
Century Hotel
A very nice hotel with great accommodations and friendly staff.

Patek Phillipe Museum
Lots of ornate and old watches, very boring tour.

Red Cross Museum
The guided tour was dreadfully boring.

United Nations Building
The speakers were hit or miss, but the building itself was pretty neat to see.

Bergdorf, Switzerland
Had a nice castle and old architecture, not much else.

Rondo Doge
Was neat to see how food was made, liked getting free food at the end of the tour.

Carlos from Goldman Sachs
A great speaker and I found his perspective on studying abroad and the investment banking business very interesting and useful.

What more I should have done:
Gone to the alps to attempt snowboarding, skiing, or sledding.

2/4/09 back from Geneva finally, tour of National Theatre

Up at 4:30am to get on the bus at 5:15am for our flight at 7:45 am. Slept a bit on the bus and plane and tube when I could. We got back around 10:00am and then had to be at the National Theater at noon for a tour. They showed us backstage, where the actors were practicing, and where they make props for the shows. I really didn't find it interesting and just wanted to sleep in the worst way. Got back to the flat and then passed out for about 2 hours.

2/3/09 you ain't goin nowhere

We find out we aren't leaving today and the earliest reservation we could get is for a 7:45am flight tomorrow morning, meaning we have to leave by bus at 5:15am. Oh well, at least we are getting back to London. Bored once again, I surfed the internet for a while and read some hilarious Tuckermax stuff, then updated my blog some more. We all got another nice dinner at the hotel, which should be paid for by British Airways.

2/2/09 stranded in Geneva, London airport closed down from snow

So we find out at breakfast that London is completely shutdown from "The worst snowstorm in 18 years", which gave them a grand total of about 6 inches of snow. Heathrow Airport, the tube, busses, schools, etc are all shut down in London because apparently Brits have no idea how to deal with a little snow. So we are stuck in Geneva for at least another day. To make matters worse there was also a fire in the Geneva airport which put all of their computer systems offline. I feel kind of bad for Davis getting the super runaround from all these different places and no answers for how we are getting back to London.

It seems like almost nothing went right on this whole trip, so this probably shouldn't have surprised me, but I was still pissed that I was stuck in boring Geneva for at least one more day. JJ, Nate, and I went and got some premium Swiss chocolate, which was very delicious. I also got a postcard and my free little souvenir spoon. Just hung around on the internet in the hotel for the rest of the time and updated this blog.

2/1/09 free day in Geneva, bored to tears

Woken up at 5am by Andrew after he got back from watching the Super Bowl, apparently it was a good game and the Steelers won. After breakfast I wandered around Geneva with Dean, JJ, and Nate and we saw some interesting architecture. The city looked nice with a fresh cover of snow, and we walked around a park taking pictures. Other than that just stayed in the hotel and tried to catch up on some work. Geneva is really boring and expensive.

From Geneva Trip

From Geneva Trip

1/31/09 Part 2: Patek Phillipe for second worst tour ever

From Geneva Trip

After a break of an hour something for lunch we headed to Patek Phillipe's museum, the Swiss watch maker. However, the museum was located in a different place than the store we were at, and so Davis had to scramble to try and lead us to the actual museum. We were kind of lost and while crossing the street a guy in a random car yelled something at Davis because the car almost hit him. Davis replied to us: "I think that guy just yelled at me in Swiss."

The tour was unbearable and after about 2 minutes I couldn't care less about the entire history of watch making forever, which was what we were getting. Our tour guide repeatedly talked about how it was amazing that they made such intricate, functional watches without any computers (not that I cared). She also talked about how much "complicate" the watches had, which is how much extra worthless crap was on the face of the watch, other than actually displaying the time.

From Geneva Trip

I headed to Coop afterwards and picked up some Smirnoff vodka and a carton of orange juice for later at night. The orange juice tasted really bad and it wasn't until after already having a couple drinks that I realized the orange juice was actually orange juice concentrate and I didn't actually read the label (which was in french). Needless to say it was really rough and didn't turn out too well. At least I got to sleep in the next morning.

1/31/09 Part 1: Carlos from Goldman Sachs, solving the financial crisis

Up at 6:30am again ugh. Headed over with the other SU kids to the Goldman Sachs office here in Geneva to see Carlos, a 1990s graduate from SU who works for Goldman Sachs in asset management for private clients in South America. He started off by talking about his personal experience studying abroad, moving from his home in Brazil to live in Selinsgrove, PA which is basically the biggest cultural shift someone could have. Carlos pointed out that studying abroad isn't for everyone, but it allows you the opportunity to rebuild yourself in a new place and really discover who you are. He also talked about the benefits of going to Susquehanna, a small university, which were great access to professors, and enhancing important communication skills.

Next he discussed his personal experience with the process of interviewing for competitive jobs like with Goldman Sachs was that you need to know the content well, maybe even study it ahead of time. More importantly, you need to be able to communicate well, which also helps if you don't know some content. Also if there is something listed on your resume, you better be ready to fully back it up and discuss it.

Then Carlos went into an overview of the structure of an investment bank, which is divided into 3 areas: Trading (proprietary, for clients), Investment Banking (IPOs, M&A, etc), and Asset Management (mutual funds, private clients). This was interesting because I got a quick tour of his trading desk office after his talk, where he pointed out the teams for different regions like France and South America, and where 6 people out of the 40 total had just gotten laid off.

I asked Carlos several very difficult questions about the financial crisis and his perspective on it, especially regarding potential government intervention and the solvency of banks. His opinion was that the US govt needs to step in and capitalize the banks more and create a bad bank to buy up troubled assets.

Carlos's position:
He elaborated that the US government needs to step in and make a market for troubled assets (like subprime) which currently do not allow for insitutions to purchase them, even if they wanted to. I asked him for his outlook on the stock market and he said he expected the government stimulus to create a market bottom in the first half of 2009.

My position:
This financial crisis will rival the Great Depression in scale and will take years to get through. The stock market will not bottom for years, and it will be at levels below DOW 5,000. Excessive borrowing, levaraging, and risk taking is what got us into this mess... so how can the government borrowing excessive amount of money to try and spend its way out of this depression work? You don't cure a heroin addict (market with extreme excess of borrowing) by giving him more heroin and telling him to take it all (govt borrowing excessively to stimulate economy).

This plan is inevitably doomed to fail... and despite what politicians and media would like you to think, the government does not have an infinite amount of money to constantly bailout the banks with. The US govt must borrow funds from somewhere, mainly China and other nations. We may reach a point of no return where the government can't borrow any more money... and then we are in big trouble. This could very well destroy the economic and political viability of the US govt, as it is unable to borrow money to finance its day to day activities.

The only way to resolve this crisis is to force the banks to stop lying about their losses and tell the truth about their financial state. Many banks will fail and many people will lose their jobs. However, this is much better than the collapse of the US govt, whose future is increasingly tied to that of the big banks as more and more taxpayer money is given to them.

I proposed that the government force banks be to mark their assets to market and admit their losses. If they go bankrupt because of it, than so be it. If necessary, the government could also use the $250 billion in leftover TARP bailout money to spin off new banks with a clean slate in order to get lending in the economy restarted.

We will not fix this crisis by just throwing money at these terribly managed banks and rewarding their bad business decisions with billion dollar bailouts. If we make the banks admit to their losses and they fail for their bad business decisions, just like capitalism is supposed to work, good banks will take over the business of the failed banks and the economy can get back on its way to recovery.

1/30/09 UN, and the Red Cross aka worst tour ever

Up at 6:30am and miserable again. After getting sort of lost after getting off the tram, we found our way to the United Nations in Geneva. The first speaker we had was decent, and I appreciated the way she tried to simplify the issues she talked about, such as aid to developing countries, into easy to understand examples.

From Geneva Trip

The second presenter about the European Economic something (I don't even know) was really bad. He was obviously a very intelligent person, but he was a horrible presenter. I really had trouble staying awake and figuring out what he was actually trying to get at, and I have a good understanding of economics. He kept talking off on random tangents constantly for these complicated issues, and when asked questions didn't actually answer them and talked about something else.

From Geneva Trip

We had a break for lunch, but the cafeteria was expensive, so JJ and I went on an adventure to find somewhere for cheap food. We walked by a protest about the war in Sri Lanka in front of the World Trade Organization building on the way there. We grabbed some sandwiches at Coop and headed back.

From Geneva Trip

The tour around the UN building was decent, and it was interesting to see the original part of the building that was used in the 1930s for the League of Nations.

From Geneva Trip

Next we headed over to the Red Cross building for a tour at 3pm. It was way too hot in the building as we walked around, and I was so tired from being up since 6:30. I just wanted to sleep in the worst way possible, but our tour guide kept talking and talking superfast and basically told us the entire history of everything forever. I was so incredibly pissed off that I had to waste my time sitting through that crap. Our tour was only supposed to last one hour, but it ended up being almost two hours, and the other half of our group that had a different tour guide had already been gone for 30 mins by the time we got done. Worst. Tour. Ever.

At like 3:30am, Andrew stumbled drunk into our room and woke me up asking some random unintelligible question which pissed me off. When I confronted him about it in the morning he got all defensive and started calling me a jerk for bringing it up... even though I was generous enough to try and wake him up for almost 10 minutes straight as he was unresponsive and wouldn't get out of bed for our morning tour. Not to mention he is unprepared and has to borrow stuff from me all the time.

1/29/09 rage over 9000, rondo doge

Had to wake up at 6am (which was actually 5am London time) in order to meet at the floor of the hotel by 7am to get breakfast and head to the bus. At 7:30 we took the bus to the train station, and then had to wait 45 minutes for our train... I was fairly pissed that we couldn't have just slept that much longer instead of sitting around doing nothing.

So we got on the train and headed to Burgdorf, which took about 2 hours, and I slept through most of it. We then were informed by Davis that we had two hours until our tour started at 1pm... 2 hours??? Why couldn't we have just slept in for another hour and a half??? At this point I was really pissed that I basically woke up early for nothing.

From Geneva Trip

The two hours consisted of JJ, Nate, and I wandering around the small town looking for food, and then realizing all the restaurants were way too expensive and buying some cheap bread from the grocery store. That took us about half an hour. Since the town was small and boring and it was too cold outside to do much of anything, we sat in the train station raging until the start of our tour.

Our tour took us around Bergdorf and into a castle that stood on top of a hill, with a great view of Bergdorf down below.

From Geneva Trip

Nest we took a tour of Rondo Doge, which is a market leader in equipment that mass produces bakery products from dough, such as croissants and doughnuts for Dunkin Donuts. I couldn't stay awake during their PowerPoint presentation because I was so tired from getting up at 6am, and the room was warm too. Walking around their factory was mediocre, but it was interesting to see the demonstration of their machines in action making some double decker pastries. The best part of the tour was when we got to eat several of the double decker pastries, which were tasty.

From Geneva Trip

We took the train and didn't get back to the hotel until after 5pm and I was wiped out. Got some food with JJ from the Coop grocery store and spent the rest of the night on the internet, lounging around, and then passing out after midnight.

1/28/09 flight to Geneva

All our other classes were cancelled, so after theatre class from noon to 1:30 I went back to flat and grabbed some food. I saw Andrew there, who apparently made it back to London after getting a temporary emergency passport from the US embassy in Amsterdam. I finished packing, and then rode the tube all the way to Heathrow Airport.

We all got to the airport early and wandered around for a while before getting on the plane. The flight to Geneva was only about 1.5 hrs. We stayed at the Century Hotel which was very nice. My room (shared with Andrew) had a big and comfy bed, lots of space, and a shower with great water pressure. Although my room also had random paintings of naked women, which was unexpected.